A RECENT REPORT in the New York Times drawing attention to a legal loophole that allowed hundreds, possibly thousands, of wild horses to be rounded up and funnelled into a ‘kill chain’ has triggered a furore in the US amongst animal rights activists and wild herd advocacy group. Which has in turn ignited a firestorm of online outrage.

It’s the modern-day equivalent of an epic letter-writing protest that started seventy-five years ago and almost certainly saved America’s wild herds from extinction.

This US’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) oversees the maintenance and protection of an estimated 85,000 mustangs that currently roam 27 million acres of federally owned lands, across a ten-state southwestern arc that runs from Montana to Arizona.

The agency’s stated goal is to reduce their number to just 27,000, claiming to the incredulity of wild herd experts and advocacy groups an ideal ratio of one wild horse to a thousand acres of forage space.

In fact, the BLM, which is part of the Department of the Interior headed by Doug Burgum, one of Trump’s most craven Cabinet members, is succumbing to pressure from lobbyists for the beef and fossil fuel industries.

Doug Burgum pictured with Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Each is determined to expand their federal grazing and exploration grazing rights and are pushing for the removal of mustang herds, which they regard as a nuisance consumer of valuable water and grazing resources.

The controversy is new but it’s an old story. During a fifty-year extermination campaign that began in the early 1900s wild mustangs were poisoned and shot, run off cliff edges by their thousands or weighted down with tractor tires and chased until they died of exhaustion.

Congress was forced to act in 1971, spurred by the biggest protest letter writing campaign in US history. It was orchestrated by Velma Johnston, a feisty secretary from Reno, who happened upon a blood-soaked truck crammed with dead and dying mustangs on her way to work one day.

By the time Congress finally passed legislation to protect the herds in 1971, two million mustangs had been slaughtered. Fewer than 15,000 survived.

A grim and modern reality

More than half a century later, the New York Times has........

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